The GSAR ICS Project
GSAR in Canada is administered by federal, provincial/territorial, and municipal organizations with the support of 300 volunteer SAR teams across the country.
The varying GSAR applications that are in use currently have the following limitations:
- technology doesn’t integrate with the common productivity apps used my most organizations within the GSAR community;
- technology is not interoperable;
- tech doesn’t scale for large scale multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional incidents;
- little to no automation of data collection or entry;
- insufficient data being generated for knowledge management to inform policy and budgeting; and
- some existing GSAR tech is difficult or awkward to use and is unreliable.
The good news is that most Canadian GSAR organizations have adopted the standard ICS concept of operations as well as a standard approach to GSAR workflow.
The following lists some of the advanced capabilities of the GSAR ICS Solution:
- mobile, configurable, scalable, and interoperable;
- online/offline capability with real-time situational awareness and communications at the tactical edge;
- automated data collection and storage including evidence, images, videos and chat;
- flexible incident management, reporting and knowledge management capabilities; and
- integration with existing technology investments and a plug-in architecture that enables onboarding of new capabilities.